Extremely stringent requirements in terms of reliability are placed on sensors of this type since faulty functioning or failures may also present hazards under certain circumstances. This relates both to the sensor itself and to the electrical connections between the sensor and the circuits which supply the sensor with operating voltage and receive and evaluate the output signals from the sensor.
In this case, the cable connections and contact points used for this purpose may represent origins of faults which may lead to serious faults even in the case of a double configuration of the sensors and the connecting elements for redundancy reasons in safety-relevant systems. In addition, owing to the increasing introduction of electronic devices in motor vehicles the number of cable connections in increasing continuously, in which case laying many lines is disadvantageous for cost and weight reasons.